


All She Has Is A Hammer

by Thene



Category: Final Fantasy III
Genre: Dragoon!Refia, Gen, fetch quests, girl making stuff, literal irons in the fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-05-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 16:32:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1655132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thene/pseuds/Thene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Refia sets off into the depths of Eureka with one goal in mind; to become the second-best crystalsmith in the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All She Has Is A Hammer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [justira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justira/gifts).



> Thanks to Justira for the prompt: _A focus on Refia and smithing! I can never get enough of that. Art showing her working would be fabulous. For fics, anything that focuses on her learning the trade would be great, any age. You can throw in any ships you like, but I would prefer for the prompt overall to remain pretty PG-Teen level in terms of violence or sexual content._
> 
> Post-canon, so be assured that anyone passingly referenced in a sexual light is of legal age, etc.
> 
> NB: I curtailed this slightly due to deadline - I expect to revise it in the near future, and will let you know when I do so!

When Refia returned home, she brought a piece of crystal with her. She'd found it Eureka, on a stone outcrop above the void; she had slipped it in her pack and told no one of it.

It was years later when, with hands spitted with mythril burns and soot-black in every ridge, she decided to look at the crystal. It was a scale about the size of her palm, twisted like a petal, and so thin that when she held it to the fire she saw light shine straight through it. The bright flames refracted into motes of red and green light, a kalaidoscope held in her tongs. For a moment, she wondered if hitting it would be a bad idea. 

She knew it wouldn't crack, because her own suit of crystal armour had withstood the heat of dragon breath. But she needed to shape it, to flatten out its form into something that could make part of a breastplate, or a gauntlet, or a shield? She hadn't decided. She laid the hot crystal on the anvil, and raised her hammer over her head. She wasn't sure what was going to happen, but knew nothing would be accomplished unless she hit it as hard as possible. 

She gave the crystal a mighty blow, and her hammer exploded. 

 

It was no good trying to explain to Takka. So she didn't. She swept up every iron splinter, dropped the crystal into the water bucket - it didn't even sizzle - and then pulled it out, cold and wet, and laid it on her shelf of failed experiments. It was a long shelf, and Tekka allowed her to keep such things as a check on her considerable pride; for every new accomplishment, he would cast a significant eye over the collection of botched chain-links and two-thumbed gauntlets and unintentionally ugly jewelry, and she would vow to figure out every problem of smithing eventually. There was nothing she wouldn't learn.

But in the meantime, Luneth and Arc had threatened to visit and Takka would soon return to check that she'd cleaned the forge and put everything in its rightful place, and it was all a little more than she wanted to deal with so she started packing. She reached for the spear that hung on the wall of her forge, and her hands in her thick forge-gloves slipped on the shaft, feeling the numb tingle. She'd replaced the shaft twice, experimenting with blends of mythril steel, but the way Gungnir feels in her hands never changes. 

Luneth and Arc ran into her outside - almost literally, Lune careening down the path and yelling over his shoulder at his brother without looking where he was going. Refia was wearing her crystal mail, shimmery under the blue sky, and Gungnir was slung over her back, which made negotiating the narrow path a little difficult. She kept getting caught on low-hanging trees. "Where are _you_ going?" asked Luneth as she tripped by him, a little indignant. 

"Eureka," she told them. "I'm going to see the crystalsmith."

 

They didn't travel together any more. If she ever disliked being alone, she knew she could blame only herself; she'd been the one who'd decided it was over and she would return to her forge and be a smith, and then Ingus had returned to Sara and Luneth and Arc had gone back home to their parents; Lune still went as whim took him, and Arc dutifully took an airship to Saronia whenever Alus requested his presence (but not too often, because it would have caused Talk). Refia's forays rarely intersected with their footsteps. She liked to go to underground places, secret places.

Secrets got around faster than Mogmail, and quite often she'd breach the upper layers of some chasm or other and find a cloaked figure awaiting her. Often enough that it was in the back of her mind as she went, that in whatever deep she reached she might have someone to share the cold and the dark with. But as she descended Eureka, she remained alone.

So she leapt, from precipice to precipice over the scattered stars, looking for the crystalsmith. The man they'd found hidden away in the depths, who had almost silently traded with them for some of the most remarkable treasures in all the world - mail and gloves, helm and shield, all crafted from perfectly cut plates of crystal. 

When she reached that hidden room at the end of all mysteries, she tapped Gungnir lightly on the floor to announce her presence. She could see almost nothing - flickers of spectral light, arcs from red to violet. She knew the crystalsmith was there only from a rattle of coin, and because there was nowhere else he possibly could be.

"I want to be a crystalsmith," she announced. "I'm ready to learn all about it." 

She'd learned mythril in the years since coming home. But the things she'd seen and touched - adamant, enchanted things, crystal - made mythril feel like a folly. She made brooches of it, little decorative wrought metal things. She nodded sagely when Takka told her of the greatness of mythril, the enchantments a smith's hands could set in it, and then she wondered how she'd ever get to work on something useful. Perhaps someone, somewhere smelted adamant ore? But _crystal_ , with crystal she could make anything that anyone needed. A suit of armour or ten, a spear or twenty. Just so long as someone would show her where to get enough crystal and how to work it.

"I'm an ironsmith, and a mythrilsmith," she told the crystal smith proudly. "And a dragoon," she added in the yawning gap of his silence, Gungnir quiverring in her hand. The crystal spearhead made a quiet sound as it shook, and the faint spark it emitted was all the light they had.

His silence went on like the stars.

_You swung a hammer for years without learning anything._

He hadn't spoken a word; he'd only stared at her in the dark until she realised it for herself.

 

Another thing she'd never told anyone was that she came home knowing that she should never have run away from mythril. She'd been lazy and a coward, not because she'd not wanted to learn, but because she was so tired of failing. Takka had seemed so strict before! And there had never seemed to be a point in being bad at working mythril, when she could do so much with iron, horseshoes and railings and nails and knives; no one would ever come to her for mythril, because there wasn't much need for it and Takka had more than enough time for all the mythril-work anyone could ever want. But everyone needed iron.

She _had_ set to learn the ways of mythril, and her next discovery was that it _wasn't_ hard - it was soft and it went the way it would and one had to follow it. It took great trickery to make a straight edge out of mythril; naturally it set in curves. Being a mythrilsmith reminded her of being underwater. You had to find its current and follow it.

She'd unwrapped her crystal shard because she was quite, quite satisfied that she'd made sense of mythril and needed to move on to being a crystalsmith. Almost the only crystalsmith. She was, already, at the moment she raised her hammer, the second-best crystalsmith in the world, and she was very proud of that fact right up until it exploded.

Takka always told her, _You don't learn, Ref. You leap._ He thought it was funny. He thought his dragoon daughter and the spear her friend had stolen from the hand of a god was funny. She'd done her very best to just nod and not look up at where Gungnir hung on the wall, and not think of how the godspear had carried her over outcrops, rooftops, rivers, void. She wouldn't close her eyes and think of Gungnir sailing point-first into a thousand enemies, like she was but an accessory to a death caused entirely by gravity, a mere guiding hand, a vector. Gungnir existed to slay a god's enemies. The crystal spearhead had no other destiny.

The crystalsmith's silence worked itself into her again. _Crystal can't be smithed. It_ is _balance; a tool can't change what the balance is. To make with crystal is simply to see what it is. See what it can't not be. What it needs to be, to keep the peace between dark and light._

She didn't need another suit of crystal plate armour, did she? She was already wearing one. But the smith was not unkind, and he handed her a heavy, cuboid lump before he dismissed her in a flick of light and shadow. She knew what it was even just by touch, long before she climbed above and saw it in the daylight.

It was a crystal that needed to be a hammer.

 

Refia returned home to Takka's grouching and his poorly hidden delight - he worried, she knew well, and he didn't believe in his hero daughter and her godspear. She started working soon afterward, chipping at her gift with a chisel and watching each excess scab of matter fall off the shape inside it, the thing she _knew_ was there - a hammerhead. Just a hammerhead. She cut and sanded a wooden handle, wove leather thongs about the head. Maybe it wouldn't break in her hands.

It wasn't much of a starting point. There wasn't a lot you could do with just a hammer. She hoped that her normal forge-tools might survive whatever it was she had to do next.

She found her first crystal - sat maliciously unblemished on her shelf of abandoned possibilities, pale and cool in her hand. She didn't set it to the heat, but, a little superstitiously, she waved her hammer through the fire and watched the light and the shadows dance around it, red-white-purple in the fire. She pulled down her mask and turned her face away reflexively as she tapped, merely tapped, the crystal on the anvil -

It _unfolded_ , splitting in two along some imperceptible fissure; as crystal can split from crystal and still remain one, held between dark and light. Two twists. She picked them up in her blunt fingers, spinning the pieces instinctively, _seeing_ how to fit them together. Two curved pieces. 

They'd need more work, and some way to hold the two halves together, but Refia would have a pair of crystal forge tongs.


End file.
